Odd names are more common now. But I would pick a name that would look good on an CEO office name plate. There is a good article I read about names and socioeconomic outcomes. And they did an experiment with the same resume sent out with Anglo names and with ethic names and tracked how any interviews they got.

True story: My father has a family name that is very unusual, sounds a lot like a girl's name and would be probably considered cool today but when he was a kid it was very uncool. He said he learned to fight because of his name. He hated his name so much he goes by his middle name and named all 3 kids very plain vanilla names. I wish my name was a tad more exotic but I would error on the side of conservative for any kid of mine. You could have a coffee nick name. (peaberry would be cute) Or like you said pick a name that can be shortened or morphed to a more middle of the road name.

Odd names are more common now. But I would pick a name that would look good on an CEO office name plate. There is a good article I read about names and socioeconomic outcomes. And they did an experiment with the same resume sent out with Anglo names and with ethic names and tracked how any interviews they got.

True story: My father has a family name that is very unusual, sounds a lot like a girl's name and would be probably considered cool today but when he was a kid it was very uncool. He said he learned to fight because of his name. He hated his name so much he goes by his middle name and named all 3 kids very plain vanilla names. I wish my name was a tad more exotic but I would error on the side of conservative for any kid of mine. You could have a coffee nick name. (peaberry would be cute) Or like you said pick a name that can be shortened or morphed to a more middle of the road name.

Good you pointed out that article, Helen. I read it too a couple of years ago, iirc. I think one of the conclusions is that people with more standard, easy to say and "common" names are more likely to advance in their careered through promotion...or something to that affect. My second son is Ronan...but we figure he'll end up going by Ron or use his middle name - Dario.

.Always remember the most important thing is what ends up in your cup!

I was just reading about the seminal research in this area by Bertrand & Mullainathan (2003). In this case, they were interested in organizational discrimination in hiring. They sent 5000 resumes to 1300 job openings in Boston & Chicago, and varied the (implied) race (along with gender and qualifications) of the applicant. They manipulated race & gender by first names: e.g., Kristin, Carrie, Brad, Jay (distinctively "White"), and Ebony, Latonya, Jermaine, Leroy (distinctively "Black"). Distinctiveness of the names was based on birth certificate data from Boston births. (you can download their original report here)

In terms of race, given the same qualifications, 10.1% of "White" applicants were called, but only 6.7% of "Black" applicants were. Interesting was that resume quality (qualifications) had an impact: for "whites," high quality resumes received more callbacks, (11.3% vs. 8.8%) but for "blacks," there was little impact of quality (7% vs. 6.4%). Even the high quality "black" resume got fewer callbacks than the low quality "white" resume. There was no real difference between Boston vs. Chicago and whether the job was clerical to manager in any of 6 industries.

Their summary is that having a "white" name is equivalent to 8 more years of relevant experience in terms of being called for an interview.

I don't think you can generalize to other ethnic names, and don't have time to look up the literature, but there is an effect of something called "processing fluency" whereby we will prefer things that are easier to process mentally. For example, names that are easier to pronounce or that occur more frequently in our native language. So it would follow that, all other things being equal, people with names that are more "familiar" or "normal" in English would generally be preferred to people with names that are "weird" to English language speakers. This effect, of course, would likely be moderated by lots of other factors.

"Caturra" or "Cataui" might be weird enough to trigger processing dysfluency concerns. Mercedes not so much I think. But does "Mercedes" trigger other ethnic or racial stereotypes and biases? Maybe.

This is not to say that you should not name your child a distinctive name or a distinctively "Black" name, but rather to point out the inherent and often non-conscious biases most of us have that affect our social decision making. You need to work to consciously override those tendencies if you want to reduce your use of bias and discrimination.

As a man that has a name often mistaken for a woman's name, I am well aware of the assumptions that carries with it. I also would not want to burden my child with a lifetime of having to spell his or her name to people whenever they give their name or risk it being brutally misspelled. :) My grandson is named Darrix. I imagine that will trigger a misspelling every time. But who knows - maybe he will like being unique and spelling his name every time! :)

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